April 13, 2015

Does Bad Editing Suggest Bad Reporting?

I recently asked a handful of friends, all writers or advanced degree holders, the following question: If you noticed an unusually high number of typos and grammatical errors in an online news site -- a site with which you were not familiar -- would it diminish your confidence in the information being reported?

The initial answers included a lot of waffling: Some very good writers have bad grammar, my friends replied. Not all blogs have editors. Stuff like that.

No, I responded, I’m not talking about blogs or creative writing or commentary pieces. I’m talking about news: Would too many typos raise a red flag about the accuracy of the news itself? After more hemming and hawing, the consensus was “Maybe, maybe not.” Their answer disturbed me.

High-quality media outlets have long followed the same basic playbook for reporting the news. At the same time, they have also used copy editors and proofreaders. That’s why excessive typos are, in fact, a red flag about the content. It’s not that quality copy editing is necessary to quality reporting. It’s simply that the two have traditionally gone hand-in-hand. When editing standards go missing, an informed news consumer must wonder whether reporting standards are missing, too.

Twenty years ago, news consumers didn’t need to understand how journalism works. They didn’t need to know at what point a reporter could call someone a murderer instead of an alleged or accused murderer. They didn’t need to know which sources journalists can use (for example, eye witness accounts) and which they cannot (for example, secondhand eye-witness accounts). They didn’t need to know that reporters interviewing sources about one side of an issue are obligated to talk with someone from the opposing camp. And they didn’t need to understand the hazards of using unnamed sources. Instead, they just opened their newspapers in the morning and reaped the rewards of the highly regimented procedures that made up professional journalism.

Then came the explosion of commentary programs and news aggregators -- both of which could lure advertising revenue away from traditional news operations because they didn’t have the tremendous overhead costs of actually gathering the news. Suddenly, the journalists operating from the old playbook were looking like an endangered species. Major news agencies were laying off reporters and closing bureaus around the globe as non-news-gathering organizations undercut their advertising rates and the public got more of their news from blogs and commentary programs.

The journalists bound to traditional news-gathering practices and ethics were now mixed in with an exploding number of news suppliers playing by their own rules. The process that news consumers had always taken for granted could no longer be taken for granted.

The burden now falls on the reader to discern good information from bad. And in a system that relies on an independent press to safeguard freedom and democracy, media literacy -- understanding how news is properly gathered and being able to spot the clues that it’s not  -- is no longer optional.

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April 6, 2015

Churchill and the Greatest Untrue Grammar Story Ever Told

An L.A. Times reader a while back wrote in the letters section a little story about sentence-ending prepositions: “An editor once rewrote a sentence of Winston Churchill's in which Churchill ended a sentence with a preposition,” the reader noted in the paper’s letters section. “Churchill reportedly fired back, ‘This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put!’"

That’s a great story, as delightful as the grammar rule that elicited it. Unfortunately, both are pure myth.

Variations on the Churchill story have been circulating for a long time, for obvious reasons. It’s fun to retell. In the most popular version, however, Churchill wasn’t against sentence-ending prepositions. He was for them. The quip, as the story usually goes, was actually a rant against editors who would twist a sentence into ugly knots simply to avoid a preposition at the end. 

So the Times reader who told this story seems to have gotten the moral backwards. But his errors don’t end there. 

In recent years, researchers have determined that Churchill probably never said any such thing. Instead, the quip probably came from an unbylined writer for the Strand magazine and was later misattributed to Churchill, who also wrote for the Strand. 

And what about the rule itself? Here are the experts on that alleged rule. 

“Not only is the preposition acceptable at the end, sometimes it is more effective in that spot than anywhere else.” -- William Strunk Jr., “The Elements of Style”

“The preposition at the end has always been an idiomatic feature of English. It would be pointless to worry about the few who believe it is a mistake.” -- Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage 

“Superstition.” -- H.W. Fowler, author of Fowler’s Modern English Usage.

“Good writers don’t hesitate to end their sentences with prepositions if doing so results in phrasing that seems natural.” -- Garner’s Modern American Usage

“‘Never end a sentence with a preposition.’ … Wrong.” -- Washington Post Business Copy Desk Chief Bill Walsh

“Good writers throughout the history of English -- from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Alison Lurie and David Lodge -- have not shrunk from ending clauses or sentences with prepositions.” -- “Word Court” author Barbara Wallraff 

“For years and years Miss Thistlebottom has been teaching her bright-eyed brats that no writer would end a sentence with a preposition if he knew what he was about. The truth is that no good writer would follow Miss Thistlebottom’s rule. -- Theodore M. Bernstein, “The Careful Writer”

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March 30, 2015

Excruciating Differences in Editing Styles

Learning copy editing can be hard because there are so many little rules that, in the real world don't matter, but in editing do. For example, in editing, there are strict rules on when to use "that" and "which" that don't apply in the real world. However these words come naturally to you is probably right.

It's even harder when you have to learn two or three different editing styles because the styles can disagree on how you do certain things. Case in point: spacing around dashes. In Chicago editing style, a dash (meaning an em dash or a long dash) should touch the word on either side of it, with no spaces in between. But the Associated Press Stylebook specifies the opposite: a dash should have a space on either side.

Styles also have different rules on the serial comma, also known as the Oxford comma, which is the comma before "and" in a list like "red, white, and blue." Chicago says to include that last comma, but AP's style is to always omit it: "red, white and blue."

But the hardest thing about working in multiple editing styles is that they use different dictionaries as arbiters of all matters not covered in the style guide. As a result, there are countless points on which they could differ and you just can't know what they are until you look them up. "Healthcare"/"health care" is the quintessential example. AP's designated dictionary, Webster's New World College Dictionary, has it as one word. That means you can "healthcare" as a noun or even as an adjective, as in "a healthcare policy." But Merriam-Webster's Collegiate, which Chicago uses, says "health care" is two words. So that's how you write it as a noun. But, in keeping with the hyphenation rules that say to put a hyphen in compound modifiers (think: two-word adjectives), "health-care" does take a hyphen when modifying a noun: a health-care policy.

Maybe someday everyone will be on the same page. Until then, I'll just try to stay sane.

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March 23, 2015

Spacing After Terminal Punctuation

Did you know that you're never supposed to double-space between sentences? Most people don't. Almost daily, I see writers putting two spaces after every period -- half of which an editor will have to delete.

Why do people do this? Because once upon a time, long before anyone ever heard the term "word processing," it was correct to double space between sentences. It was logical, too. Back then, typewriters typed in what was called "monospace." The same amount of space was allotted for each character.  A capital W got as much room as a tiny little period. Picture that and you can see how much it would help to double space. With just a single space after it, a period looked almost as though it were floating between words. So it just made more sense to always put a double space after any terminal punctuation mark, including question marks and exclamation points.

But that was a long time ago. In the interim, word processing programs starting spacing letters in a more visually appealing way. Eventually, book publishers, periodicals, editing styles and even academic writing rules have came to the nearly unanimous conclusion that there should be just one space after each sentence.

If you've developed the bad habit of double spacing between sentences -- or if you worry you might have -- don't forget how helpful search and replace functions can be. In Microsoft Word, for example, you can just type period-space-space into the "search" field and "period-space" into the replace field and the computer will find and clean up every one at once, or let you approve each change individually.

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March 16, 2015

'Log Onto' or 'Log On To'? Prepositions with Phrasal Verbs

Would you write about how you log "onto" the Internet? Or would you make that log "on to”?

It seems that most people prefer the first one, which makes sense in a way because “onto” is the offspring of “on” and “to” – as if they just sort of melded into one word anytime they appear next to each other.

But it’s not always that simple. And to know whether you need “onto” or “on to,” or for that matter “into” or “in to,” you need to know about phrasal verbs.

Phrasal verbs are verbs composed of more than one word: throw up, shrug off, speak up, go on, make up, and many more. The first word is usually a regular verb and the second is often a preposition, though sometimes it can be more than one preposition, as in put up with.

They’re different from other verb-preposition combos – speak to, compare with, throw at, etc. – for one very important reason: the preposition doesn’t just work with the verb. It actually changes it. For example: “speak to” vs. “speak up.” The latter has an entirely different meaning. The preposition "up" actually changed the verb in a way that “to” could not.

So "speak up" is a phrasal verb. And that’s the key to understanding “log on” and “log in,” both of which are also phrasal verbs. To “log” would mean something different without the preposition. That’s why, in my view, “log on to” is superior to “log onto” and “log in to” is better than “log into.” The first preposition is actually part of the verb, so it's not like some other generic preposition that can be melded into another in "onto" and "into."

Of course we can also question whether “log onto” and “log into” are phrasal verbs in their own right. That’s not quite as clear – it’s determined by usage plus time, really. So time may tell. But for now, logging on is something you do and you may or may not being doing it "to" something else.

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March 9, 2015

A Reminder About 'Led' and 'Lead'

Here's a reminder we could probably all use: the word "lead" is always trying to squeeze in where you want "led." In fact, almost any time you are talking about leading in the past tense, it's good to take note of your verbs.

Here's why "led" is so tricky. It's the past tense of the verb "lead," which rhymes with "read," but which happens to have a homograph that's a metal, "lead," which rhymes with "head." (If you are, at the moment, experiencing a rush of sympathy for people from other countries who are trying to learn English, you're not alone.)

So it's no surprise that one of the most common mistakes I see comes in sentences like, "The tour guide, a charming man named Raul, lead us through miles of rainforest."

Nope. That should be "led us through" because the past tense of the verb "lead" is "led": today I lead the meeting, yesterday I led the meeting.

I would estimate that writers -- native English speakers -- get this wrong close to half the time. And it's not because they don't know better. It's because this past tense form, which sounds like a noun that looks like its own root verb, is perfect for tripping you up.

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March 2, 2015

A Sign of 'The Times'

Sometimes it seems like a good chunk of my day is spent lowercasing the T in the word “The.”

In Las Vegas articles and marketing pieces, I lowercase it in “the Strip.” In articles about shopping centers I might lowercase it in “the Forum Shops.” Whenever there’s mention of “the New Yorker,” “the New Republic” or “the Atlantic,” down it goes.

Why? Because that’s the style at the Los Angeles Times. Specifically, the style rule is this: Whenever a proper noun that begins with the word “The” appears in running text, lowercase the t for aesthetic reasons.  And when you spend some time looking at the alternatives, you can see the logic in this. In uppercase, all those Ts would look self-conscious and obtrusive. They really do interrupt the visual flow of the text.

The companies being mentioned, of course, don’t like this one bit. We’re “The” Cosmopolitan or “The” Forum Shops, they'd insist. They’re all about brands and trademarks and property, after all. But they can’t dictate how other people capitalize their names, so newspapers like the Los Angeles Times are free to make decisions that they believe put readers first, lowercasing “the” in order to make the passage more visually palatable.

I’m all for that, barring one little bit of irony. The newspaper does make an exception: There’s one name that does, in Times style, always use a capital T in "The." And that name is ... you guessed it: The Times. Not the New York Times, mind you. In the Los Angeles Times, the East Coast paper would be “the Times” (though because that would be confusing their whole name is usually spelled out). Only when it’s a reference to the Los Angeles Times does The Times start with a capital T.

So in running text, it's the Forum Shops, the Standard, the Anythingyoucanthinkof, but The Times.

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February 23, 2015

A Dead Giveaway in a Headline

People sometimes ask me whether, as an editor and grammar buff, I'm constantly annoyed by errors -- so much so that it sucks all the pleasure out of reading. This usually comes from people who themselves are driven nuts by the many typos they see in print and figure I must have an acute case of the same ailment.

My answer is always: kind of. I am sometimes distracted by errors, but reading for content, which I do in my own time, is very different from proofreading. My mind's in a whole different place, so little typos don't demand too much of my attention.

Headlines are different. When I'm looking at the headline for an article, my brain hasn't yet fully kicked in to reader gear. So that's probably why the most distracting things to me when I read are miscapitalized headlines.

I can sometimes tell right away whether a pro edited an article just by how its headline is capitalized. As you've probably noticed, most places capitalize the first letter of most words in headlines, but not all. Little words like "in," "at," "and," and "the" usually start with lowercase letters even when the other words in the headline start with caps.

People used to seeing this style guess that the criteria for deciding whether to lowercase a first letter of a word in a headline is all about size: Little words can start with lowercase letters. But that's not true.

In the most standard editing styles, "in" starts with a lowercase letter, but "is" doesn't. Neither does "it." The difference? "It" is a pronoun, "is" is a noun, and "in" is a preposition. Pronouns and nouns have important jobs in a sentence. They're the actors and the actions. Prepositions are less consequential. That's why most style guides follow a headline style of lowercasing the first letter of short prepositions, but not of pronouns or nouns: Candidate Says It's in the Bag.

And that's something only pros seem to know.

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February 16, 2015

Hyphens in Complicated Compounds

June,

Just another of my pet peeves: It's about the practice of using a hyphen to connect two words to make a compound adjective.  It's when one of the two components being connected is actually a term of two or more words. ... I say that a hyphen should also be added between the two words in the term, because leaving it out results in inaccuracy. What actually gets said is different from what the writer meant.  Here's some actual examples I've seen in print lately, why they're bad, and how it's better to add the extra hyphen.

1.  "olive tree-shaded back patio"

This phrase, as written, says "a patio that is shaded by trees and is also olive-colored".  The patio surely is not colored olive.  The intent was to say that the patio is shaded by an olive tree.

2.  "greasy spoon-inspired plates"  [I expect you to smile about this one!]

This phrase, as written, says "plates that are inspired by spoons and are also greasy".  I am 100% sure that those plates were not inspired by spoons!  The intent was to say that the meals were inspired by the kind of food at roadside diners.

I agree. Greasy spoon-inspired plates needs another hyphen.

For "The Best Punctuation Book, Period" I specifically researched this stuff. I found that pretty much none of the major authorities addresses this issue at all. They just sort of leave people to guess. That's why I'm curious if you've ever seen documented rules to the contrary.

As for all-day/all-night diner, I asked four working copy editors to choose between "30-day-dry-aged beef" and "30-day dry-aged beef." They split 50-50. When the scope of the modifier is uncertain, I think it should be decided by the writer or editor's intent and desired emphasis.

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February 9, 2015

Hyphens Editors Can't Agree On

Some rules were meant to be broken. But other rules can be a comfort. Sometimes you don’t want to decide for yourself whether a comma adds a certain je ne sais quoi to a sentence. You just want a simple rule to tell you whether to use one so you can focus on the actual content of your writing.

It doesn’t always go that way. Yes, there are some very clear rules in the punctuation world. But just outside their borders is a punctuation no-man’s land where rules can be murky or even nonexistent.

When I wrote my punctuation book, I wanted to offer some help in these areas, so I did the whole fools-rush-in thing, looking at areas where there were no clear rules. But instead of offering my own opinions, I asked some working editors how they would punctuate certain sentences. Sometimes, they all agreed. Other times, they didn’t. Here are some notable matters on which they split.

Commas around too, either, and also:

I like it, too. / I like it too.

I too saw that movie./ I, too, saw that movie.

I didn’t see that movie, either./ I didn’t see that movie either.

He wrote “Love Story,” also. / He wrote “Love Story” also.

Comma after a title of work that includes an exclamation point or question mark.

Shows playing this week include “Greg London: Impressions that Rock!,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” and “Jersey Boys.”  /  Shows playing this week include “Greg London: Impressions that Rock!” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Jersey Boys.” 

Possessive apostrophe inside quote marks designating a title of a work. 

“Casablanca’s” best scene / “Casablanca”’s best scene

Hyphen in compound adjective after a linking verb. This is an interesting one, because AP style talks specifically about hyphens in compounds after the verb “be.” “This dessert is guilt-free,” the guide says, should probably be hyphenated. But there’s no discussion of any other linking verbs like seem, appear, taste, etc. No surprise, then, that editors split.

This dessert seems guilt-free./ This dessert seems guilt free.

The target looks bullet-riddled. / The target looks bullet riddled.

This meat tastes hickory-smoked. / This meat tastes hickory smoked.

He feels honor-bound. / He feels honor bound.

She appears quick-thinking. / She appears quick thinking.

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